laze of
its politeness.

This character, slumbering in married happiness for sixteen years,
occupied since then with the trivialities of social life, this nature
to which a first hatred had revealed its strength, awoke now like a
conflagration; at the moment of the woman's life when she was losing
the dearest object of her affections and needed another element for the
energy that possessed her, this flame burst forth. Natalie could be but
three days more beneath her influence! Madame Evangelista, vanquished
at other points, had one clear day before her, the last of those that
a daughter spends beside her mother. A few words, and the Creole nature
could influence the lives of the two beings about to walk together
through the brambled paths and the dusty high-roads of Parisian society,
for Natalie believed in her mother blindly. What far-reaching power
would the counsel of that Creole nature have on a mind so subservient!
The whole future of these lives might be determined by one single
speech. No code, no human institution can prevent the crime that
kills by words. There lies the weakness of social law; in that is the
difference between the morals of the great world and the morals of the
people: one is frank, the other hypocritical; one employs the knife,
the other the venom of ideas and language; to one death, to the other
impunity.

The next morning, about mid-day, Madame Evangelista was half seated,
half lying on the edge of her daughter's bed. During that waking hour
they caressed and played together in happy memory of their loving life;
a life in which no discord had ever troubled either the harmony of
their feelings, the agreement of their ideas, or the mutual choice and
enjoyment of their pleasures.

"Poor little darling!" said the mother, shedding true tears, "how can I
help being sorrowful when I think that after I have fulfilled your every
wish during your whole life you will belong, to-morrow night, to a man
you must obey?"

"Oh, my dear mother, as for obeying!--" and Natalie made a little motion
of her head which expressed a graceful rebellion. "You are joking," she
continued. "My father always gratified your caprices; and why not? he
loved you. And I am loved, too."

"Yes, Paul has a certain love for you. But if a married woman is
not careful nothing more rapidly evaporates than conjugal love. The
influence a wife ought to have over her husband depends entirely on how
she begins with him. You need the